Writing in the New Statesman he explains that almost 12 years into his detention without charge at the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, he’s been trying to work out what gets the camp’s censors hot under the collar. His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, drops off a few books every three months or so, but it’s still “difficult to identify any consistent or logical basis for the censorship“. Nineteen Eighty-Four is apparently fine. Gulag Archipelago is not.

On his most recent visit in October, Clive gave me a list of the titles he had dropped off for me, so I could let him know later what had been banned by what I prefer to call the Guantánamo Ministry of Information. One was Booky Wook Two by Russell Brand. I understand that Brand uses too many rude words. I suppose you have to be amused by that: the US military is solicitous of my sensitive nature, and wants to protect me from swearing. These are the same people who say that all of us at Guantanamo are dedicated terrorists.

Way back in 2007 Mark Falkoff – the lawyer who put together a collection of inmates’ poetry, Poems from Guantánamo – said that prisoners were “writing poetry because they need some kind of mental stimulation, some way of expressing their feelings, some outlet for their creativity”. Five years later Aamer writes that when he is “allowed to read, for a short while it lifts the heavy gloom that hangs over me”. It’s 12 years since he saw his wife and children, the youngest of whom was born the day his father arrived in Guantánamo Bay. Twelve years of imprisonment without charge. If literature can help him face the prospect of another day in prison, the least I can do is send the guy a decent book. Let’s see if it arrives.